Cosmic strings are generically predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. We propose a new avenue for detecting cosmic strings through their effect on the filamentary structure in the cosmic web. Using cosmological simulations of the density wake from a cosmic string, we examine a variety of filament structure probes. We show that the largest effect of the cosmic string is an overdensity in the filament distribution around the string wake. The signal from the overdensity is stronger at higher redshift and more robust with a wider field. We analyze the spatial distribution of filaments from a publicly available catalog of filaments built from Sloan digital sky survey galaxies. With existing data, we find no evidence for the presence of a cosmic string wake with string tension parameter $G\mu$ above $5\times {10}^{-6}$. However, we project WFIRST will be able to detect a signal from such a wake at the 99% confidence level at redshift $z=2$, with significantly higher confidence and the possibility of probing lower tensions ($G\mu \sim {10}^{-6}$), at $z=10$. The sensitivity of this method is not competitive with constraints derived from the cosmic microwave background. However, it provides an independent discovery channel at low redshift, which could be a smoking gun in scenarios in which the cosmic microwave background bound can be weakened.

• Received 12 May 2020
• Accepted 24 July 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.043509